SOUTHERN LIGHTS: I don’t know what to think of Edward Snowden

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM

I’d hate to get a telephone call from Edward Snowden. In the first place, I wouldn’t know what to say.

I’d hate to get a telephone call from Edward Snowden.In the first place, I wouldn’t know what to say.The 29-year-old computer specialist blew the whistle on a supposedly secret National Security Agency program to “mine” online and telephone data. Then he went into hiding.I generally like whistle-blowers, particularly when they lift the veil on the secret workings of government. We shouldn’t have this kind of clandestine program in the United States. It reeks of Nixon, enemies lists and all sorts of bad things.On the other hand, a lot of people feel that Snowden is a traitor because the government insists that the program was being used to wage war on terror. The government plans to charge him with somethingornuther under the Espionage Act.Plus, Snowden sounds like a little snot, the kind of person you’d just hate to talk to. A writer in The New York Post called him a “spoiled-brat, dropout Benedict Arnold” and a Washington Post columnist said Snowden in interviews seems “grandiose to the point of self-parody.”He is a former employee of the NSA, where he learned of the massive data-collection program, called PRISM (sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, doesn’t it?). It makes you wonder about the soundness of the NSA and how many workers like Snowden it employs.To top everything off, a phone call from Edward Snowden might land you in jail — or maybe in some rendition hellhole in Burkino Faso or Tegucigalpa. You can bet that PRISM is focusing all of its monitors on Snowden’s cellphone. That call from him in Hong Kong, Moscow, Ecuador, Cuba, or wherever he was in the middle of last week would be traced to you in a millisecond.I suppose that I’m just like most Americans. I don’t know rightly what to make of Snowden.I do know that he’s stirred up a hornet’s nest of talk about security and privacy, and a lot of it has made President Barack Obama look bad. Or look even worse. Already, Obama was looking like a George Bush under a layer of JCPenney clothing. He has disappointed a lot of supporters. Maybe PRISM is the straw that broke the camel’s back.To be sure, Obama has talked about all the right things: closing Guantanamo, ending the never-ending war on terror, reversing global warming, making the government more transparent — but he hasn’t done any of these things.Instead, since PRISM was disclosed, Obama has been reviled for ordering a record number of drone strikes, prosecuting leakers and whistle-blowers to an extent previously unknown in government, catering to big business — all the stuff that Republicans usually (and rightfully) get saddled with.As a result, Obama’s popularity has fallen in some polls behind that of George Bush. The only bright spot for him is that in these polls, young people rate Republicans even lower than the president, saying the GOP is hidebound, old-fashioned, racist and on and on.Personally, I am ambivalent about PRISM. My head says it’s a bad program, because it involves secret surveillance and it could be used for nefarious ends by some administration with less scruples than Obama’s.But my gut says who cares? The NSA swears it’s not listening to actual conversations — but who cares if they do? All they’d hear around my house are calls from telemarketers, dumb chats with friends and family, inquiries to the bank and so forth. Listening in to my calls might help insomniacs, but it would hardly aid in the apprehension of terrorists.Again, the NSA claims it doesn’t listen to conversations, but I think it’s that possibility that has people upset. They don’t want anybody monitoring what they say to their sweethearts or angry spouses or accountants. Privacy. It’s a dumb word in this day and age, and it gets dumber by the minute. People are letting it all hang out on so-called social media. Like Johnny Manziel on Twitter. “Bulls--- like tonight is a reason why I can’t wait to leave college station ... whenever it may be,” he wrote. Or Liam Payne (star of the singing group One Direction) tweeting that he was homesick and complaining that “Whoever is ringing our rooms please stop it’s not funny ur just p---- everyone off.” Or former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner sending a link to a sexually suggestive photograph of himself via his public Twitter account.There are a million stories like that. Embarrassment all the way around.Or not. People don’t seem to care any more.I’m old school. I don’t use Twitter. I’m barely fluent in Facebook. I keep my private life to myself. To me, the telephone — and I understand that there are a lot of people who disagree — is simply a tool for giving or receiving messages.My mother was even older school. In her house in Selma until the day she died in 2011 there were two rotary-dial telephones. At least Mother didn’t have an old crank telephone, the kind that probably existed in the house in which she grew up. Back then, when phones were a newfangled thing, my grandfather was proud to own one. He had a brother who stuttered and was hard to understand in person, much less on a creaky telephone line. One evening, the brother telephoned during a thunderstorm to say that he would be late for supper.“What?” my grandfather kept saying on the other end over the boom of the thunder and the static of the poor connection. “I can’t understand you. What did you say?”His brother hawed and stammered and crackled out the message again, but my grandfather still didn’t understand. The brother grew more and more frustrated.“I said GO TO HELL,” he finally exploded. “You understood that, didn’t you?”My grandfather always laughed when he told that family story. But that’s exactly what I’d say to Snowden, the NSA, the Obama administration or Twitter if they ever called me.

Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His email address is Swind15443@aol.com.

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